I would never be one to comment on the election choices of another person when an election is actually in the offing; something I could only dream about for the poor, benighted country of my birth. So, I cannot really comment on Hungary going to the polls on the 12th of April, nor on the possibility of another Orban Government. For all I know in any visceral way the man may indeed be a populist and may indeed be beating on all the old and familiar Nationalistic/populist drums of old.
But what does this mean in practice? There must be something carried in those words that resonates, whether we believe it to be right or wrong, otherwise how to explain their enduring popularity? My friend is right when he says that a call that circumvents the rational thinking mind, whether from left or right, is more likely to resonate. We are after all a species for whom the veneer of civilization is a thin surface layer on millennia of evolution and evolution has a ‘reason’ for what it promotes and what it does not.
So, I’m not discussing politics, what am I even going to discuss and why can this be thought of, not as a rebuttal precisely for what Robert posted, but as my own opinions of elements of it. The aim I have to hope is that this piece can be read alongside his and can, perhaps, act as some form of dual illuminant to some of the ‘mysticism’ that persists within the industries in which we both still work.
Robert does make some very valid points when it comes to the neuroeconomics of his position: ‘Make the thing visible. Make it normal. Remove friction from trial.’, this is an area where the current penchant for regulation, always and forever in the quest of additional tax revenue, or to make a product ‘safe’ when it almost invariably, when it comes to gambling certainly, cannot be is, in my considered opinion, deeply flawed.
In the UK licensed led to believe Gambling Operators do indeed pay large sums on advertising and marketing, but this is matched by the ‘black-market’ or unlicensed sector and, in addition to their marketing spend and the way they normalise their product by having it listed with, and often above, licensed competitors the unlicensed sector has the inestimable advantage of not having to comply with much burdensome regulation regarding ‘spending limits’ or ‘time on game’. These are valuable metrics and for those who have the neurological attributes leading more easily to addiction can indeed be early indicators of trouble to come. But, the issue that we face is not that some of these methods can be effective in a targeted way and more of a situation that in an untargeted way all they do is annoy the very people they are aimed to detect, and many more besides.
Adults, typically, wish to be treat as adults and continual ‘Nanny knows best’ nagging, as through they were not adults but some Edwardian boy off for a perambulation through a park is not helpful. Hence, we see situations such as the manifest failure of the licensing regime for on-line Casinos in Germany, where even the industry regulators estimate some 23 Euros in every 100 spent goes to black-market operators; and industry studies put the number much closer to half.
There was a fear at one time that the black-market would simply be a scam and refuse to pay out. This fear has largely evaporated, not least because the unlicensed operators have discovered it actually pays more to ‘play fair’, no need to get a bad reputation and worry the punters when they are clamouring to give you their money because of the real things you are not doing: Not asking for proof of income. Not asking for credit limits. Letting adults get on with what is, let’s be honest, an adult activity.
So, when my esteemed former colleague talks about the reward cycle and dopamine rush he is being factually accurate and, as he himself say, not just in the field of gambling, either online or off, but in ‘clicks’ and ‘likes’ in social media posts. How satisfying it is to decry your camps current ‘bad thing’ and extol its current ‘good thing’ and then sit back and bask in the warmth of the adulation to follow.
So, we are in agreement?
Not quite. Robert brings up the issue of the ‘Near Miss’ on slot machines and this is an area that particularly vexes me. Not that I think that the ‘Near Miss’ phenomenon does not exist, I do; although the psychological evidence for it and what it purports to show is both less voluminous and far less certain than you might have been led to believe. The studies most often mentioned Clark, Dixon, Livingstone, etc. deal with simplified Slot-proxies in very different environments.
But where I do think that there should be more debate is the direction of the causal chain.
What do I mean by this? There seems to be a widespread belief that the ‘Near Miss’ phenomenon was a deliberate attempt by the designers of slot machines to trigger the very dopamine responses that would keep people playing. My argument is that this is not accurate. Oh, it might well be a fortunate happenstance, but it was not the aim.
In my opinion the aim was simple: ‘Allow players to win bigger jackpots.’
To explain why the one led to the other we have to suffer through a, hopefully quick, historical aside: Back in the day, in a slot machine with a physical reel layout, you could not pay a higher jackpot that the number of unique reel combinations multiplied by the stake and with something deducted so the machine made its expected return to player.
So, with a three reel, x20 symbols per reel machine you have 20x20x20 unique combinations and therefore 8,000 ‘ways to win or lose’, so maybe you paid 7,500 x stake on one of these unique combinations.
Pseudo Random Number Generation machines solves the problem of how many combinations could you calculate: ‘how many do you want?’ In a Double-Double Diamond machine, or at least the ones I was responsible for in a brief sojourn to the dark side [Slots!] the answer to ‘How many?’ was ’8,000,000’. But this was still a physical reel machine and had ~8,000 unique positions to map ~8,000,000 results or outcomes to. One of these outcomes remained the main jackpot and so for many of the others, many thousands of them the mapping of result to reel HAD to be: Diamond – Diamond – not quite/near miss!
This was not with the aim of promoting ‘Near Miss’ as a psychological driver, that result had existed anyway and to the extent it was yet to be examined empirically by anyone was back then perhaps only ‘suspected’ at best. But with the changes the phenomenon occurred with massively greater frequency and began to be noticed. Especially by the growing prohibitionist movement.
But my argument is that this was a side effect, not an aim.
Similarly, while the term ‘Dark Flow’ is redolent with images of suited Casino and Game Machine Manufacturers in smoke filled rooms trying to work out how to earn more money, I would argue that it, once more, gets intent backward.
This is not to say that the conception of ‘Dark Flow’ and the harms that it can cause, in some susceptible individuals, is not real and even measurable, we have the work of Dixon, Kruger et al that certainly provides some valuable insights into the phenomena.
Even the term ‘dark flow’ is not quite as modern as usage would have it. We are all doubtless aware of the fugue state into which people can descend when performing repetitive activity. Sometimes this can cause the brain free to concoct sudden insights, such as you might get in the shower and I sometimes get while ironing of all things. Sometimes, conversely, it causes time to pass without conscious recollection, and you have driven to your destination and have no real memory of anything of the last hour.
Do Slot machines induce this state in people? Well, they certainly can and since this is gambling and people are entirely capable of ‘gambling without thinking’ it can cause people to spend more money than they would have if conditions had been otherwise. But I will not say that this is the AIM of the manufacturer. Rather the aim of the manufacturer is and was to make an interesting and colourful game. Only, in some people, or perhaps even in all people in certain circumstances, this can cause a dissociative state that is not conducive to considered cognition.
So, where does this leave us on the subject of Responsible Gambling and what can be done about the small minority of individuals who are so mentally wired as to be predisposed to developing a disorder? For one I do not think that the ‘public health harm’ approach is the right one. This is the approach we are trying and if it is being hugely successful then I must have missed the evidence. We see this approach with the likes of alcohol [minimum pricing and the like] and tobacco and what has been the result?
When it comes to alcohol there has been some deterrence effect by those without. and unlikely to ever develop. a problem. Meanwhile those who might be at risk continue to drink.
The case with tobacco is even more illustrative. I’m old enough to remember when everyone in the North of England smoked [or, at least it felt that way] and you would go out for an evening and come back stinking of cigarette smoke. Am I sad that this was increasingly marginalised and that I can now go for a meal with my wife without a dozen smouldering cigarettes wafting smoke directly at me specifically? No, of course not, but people do still smoke. Worse, evidence from Australia and plain packaging seems, quite strongly, to suggest that when the legal product is now both expensive and undifferentiated then cheaper, illegal substitutes will begin to increase their share in the marketplace. Perhaps significantly.
It can be plausibly argued that, indeed, we are seeing in on-line Gaming in Germany and the Netherlands and perhaps soon enough in Britain.
So, if the public health approach to things we know can kill you has not worked as well as the heady claims made about it, how might it work for disordered gambling which is perhaps equally devastating, if less immediately deadly?
Robert is generally right with some of his prescriptions: friction does need to be reintroduced. Something to break ‘dark flow’ with slot machines perhaps, but not some ham-fisted intervention asking someone ‘are you ok?’ when the answer to that will all too often be fairly short and may contain expletives.
But more than this I think the aim has to be more effective treatments. We CANNOT stop some people from becoming addicted to all sorts of things. Criminalisation will just drive new market entrants to take advantage of the situation and anyone who thinks ‘crime’ is not a market hasn’t been paying attention to their economics lessons. But if we cannot stop there should be efforts put into ‘detect; and then ‘treat’.
In regard to the first we have the online world to thank for some real insights into play, both by time, by velocity and by duration. These insights have been driven by the mass of data the online world generates compared to bricks ‘n’ mortar and increasingly sophisticated, including via AI, methods of examining this data. Paradoxically, the very realm within which the data is most robust is probably the most difficult to ‘do something’ about the problem, certainly at this time. Although, again this is an area where a ‘sympathetic’ LLM ‘chatbot’ and equivalent might be able to coax people to seeing that they have a problem; and this is very important, people who do not themselves see that they have a problem prove very resistant to imposed solutions.
The fine line to be walked would be how intrusive to make things to get people to remain in the licensed/regulated sector so that they did not simply get fed up with being nagged and migrate to the unlicensed/unregulated sector who don’t mother them?
In bricks ‘n’ mortar? Well, Slots games provide almost as much data as online gaming does and the areas where they fall short, true proof of ID for example, can be enhanced with existing technology. So, can the games be made more ‘disruptive’ to mitigate against a fugue state? Can a ‘skill based’ game element be introduced that demands ‘presence’ in the moment? Or is that just a pseudo-marketing ploy and a loser disguised as a winner. Must we send people around ‘for a chat’?
Table games should be simpler, you have much less information currently, that is true, although that is changing as more and more RFID or Computer Vision companies enter the marketplace; and table game interaction might be some limited form of inoculant?
The aim though, always, should be to convince the individual with the problem that they have the problem, not attempt to pathologise the vast majority of perfectly healthy adults who have no problem and are not really at risk of one.
Then it is treatment.
Effective methods of getting these individuals to recognise the harms they are causing themselves and, increasingly, those around them and putting techniques in place so that these individuals can control their own symptoms. Self-exclusion being only a starting point and any self-exclusion should, perhaps, be explicitly combined with offers of treatment and treatment options, if possible ‘there-and-then’ when what might be a temporary breakthrough has led to an acknowledgement of a problem which might be easily rationalised away by the next day.
